Holmes: Uncle Sam doesn’t know best

Sunday

Jun 22, 2014 at 1:00 AMJun 30, 2014 at 10:56 PM

Iraq teaches a familiar lesson some American leaders have yet to learn.

Rick HolmesOpinion Editor

There is a vanity that has run through America's foreign policy for as long as anyone living can remember.It goes at least as far back as the Monroe Doctrine, which presumed to make the U.S. protector of the Western Hemisphere. It was in Woodrow Wilson's mind as he sat down with the other World War I victors to draw new lines on the map of the Middle East, creating Iraq, among other countries, in a land already defined by tribes and religion. There was vanity in John F. Kennedy's pledge to "bear any burden" to stop communism from succeeding anywhere in the world, and in the Clinton-era doctrine of America as the "indispensable nation."George W. Bush truly believed it was in America's power to transform post-Saddam Iraq to an enlightened democracy. For the Bush crowd, that vain impulse was exacerbated by groupthink, bad intelligence and terrible judgment. They roared into Baghdad with flags flying high, determined to fix Iraq.It was a fool's errand, and L. Paul Bremer was the perfect fool to run it.Bremer is as responsible as any American for the disaster that followed the 2003 invasion. As the governor general of occupied Iraq, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and ordered all Baathists – mostly Sunni - out of the government bureaucracy. Those orders led directly to the collapse of government services, the creation of the Sunni insurgency and a sectarian civil war so brutal that death squads in Baghdad used electric drills on the skulls of those born into a different branch of Islam.Eleven years later, Bremer and the other neocons are flocking to TV cameras and oped pages to demonstrate that they still don't get it. "Only the Americans can help the Iraqis broker across these sectarian and ethnic lines," Bremer said on MSNBC. "There is nobody else who can do it."Exactly wrong. Only Iraqis can settle their differences, through politics, war, negotiations and/or by building fences to keep the factions separated. Bremer wrote a constitution for Iraq, forced elections on Iraq and - at a cost of $1 trillion and 4,487 American lives - gave Iraq's leaders a chance to make their country work.They failed. After a revolution, you hope for a leader like George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela to emerge; someone who can unite a newborn nation. But some revolutions elevate a tyrant like Josef Stalin, a weasel like Hamid Karzai, or someone like Iraq's Nuri al-Maliki, unwilling or unable to rise above his own faction.The lesson of Vietnam, repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that we can't build their nation for them. Even if we understood their culture and history - which we don't – we'll always be outsiders. Even if they respect our intentions, they will resent our interference.Look at the record: Has there ever been an insurgency in another country that has been defused by the involvement of American troops?There's a lot of hand-wringing these days about the Obama administration's foreign policy failures. The Middle East is in turmoil, we're told, and it's all Obama's fault.But consult your memory. Can you remember a time when the Middle East wasn't a place of tribal and religious warfare, of brutal dictatorships, revolutions brewing and being suppressed, terrorists blowing up things? I don't.The Middle East is a boiling cauldron of violence and hatred. The closer we get to it, the more likely we are to get splattered and burned – especially when American actions end up adding fuel to the fire.The CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, and payback came with the seizing of the American embassy in 1979. In defense of the Kuwaiti royal family, President George H.W. Bush stationed U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990, inspiring a little-known Saudi cleric named Osama bin Laden to issue a fatwa against the U.S. Payback for that intervention came on 9/11. Ten years later, we saw more payback in Benghazi.Call it isolationism if you want, but there are ways to engage and improve the world that don't involve soldiers, bombs and drones. Call Obama's reluctance to fight over Takrit, Kandihar or Crimea a retreat if you want. I prefer withdrawal over escalating wars we can't win.Back when he was a lowly state senator, Barack Obama announced his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. "I don't oppose all wars," he said. "What I'm opposed to is a dumb war."Nothing would be dumber than to jump back into the Iraq quagmire. The American people are smarter than that, and so is their president. Let the Iraqis work it out. They are the only ones who can.Rick Holmes, opinion editor for the Daily News, can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com.